in a cage formed by a high counter terminating in brass
bars.

Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked "Private."
Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of
a piano.

Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that
the boorishness of New York theatrical managers' office-boys cannot be
the product of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the
criminal districts of the town, there is a school where small boys are
trained for these positions, where their finer instincts are
rigorously uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by
competent professors. Of this school the Cerberus of Messrs. Goble and
Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his natural gifts, his
teachers had given him special attention. When he had graduated, it
had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the entire staff. They had
taught him all they knew, and they were proud of him. They felt that
he would do them credit.

This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed, bit his
thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears and hair were
vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven hundred and forty-three
pimples.

"Woddyerwant?" enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the
question into a word of one syllable.

"I want to see Mr. Goble."

"Zout!" said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.

There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her
kings and her helots, King Arthur's Round Table its knights and its
scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no
nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally
superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to
the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their
pinnacle they look down on the common herd, the _canaille_, and
despise them. They coldly question their right to live.

Jill turned pink. Mr. Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this
situation, had, she remembered, recommended "pushing the office-boy in
the face": and for a moment she felt like following his advice.
Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach b